The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) has seen passenger numbers plummet from 600-million a year in the 2014/15 financial year, to 15-million in the last financial year, says CEO Hishaam Emeran.

Emeran says 50% of the 2 300-km PRASA network was impacted by theft and vandalism owing to Covid-19-related shutdowns.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, PRASA operated 40 corridors. To date, 19 corridors have been recovered to provide a limited peak-hour service.

“We have been putting a lot of effort into rebuilding and recovering the system,” says Emeran.

“We are no longer at a point where things are a disaster – there is hope. We are now fully in the recovery programme, but, having said that, a lot more work needs to be done.”

Emeran says PRASA not only has to return more corridors to service, but it also has to increase the frequency of its trains on the corridors already rehabilitated.

“We need to acknowledge that the services we are running on those corridors are not sufficient to meet demand. At the moment, we are running a train every 45 minutes to one hour.

“In peak periods, a train needs to run every five to ten minutes. The reason we are not doing that is that we need to recover the signalling systems.

“At the moment, on a lot of the corridors, we are using manual authorisation.”

Emeran says it is PRASA’s focus to roll out new signalling systems, which should take between 12 to 18 months.

He adds that PRASA has already received 104 of the new 600 trains ordered from Gibela, which is based in Nigel, Gauteng.

Emeran says it is PRASA’s hope to serve not only its natural captive market – the poorest commuters – but to also become a mode of choice.

At the moment a return ticket from Naledi to Johannesburg city costs R17.

Emeran notes, however, that a rail system moving only 15-million people a year “is not sustainable”.

“You need higher volumes.”

He says this means that there will be a three- to five-year period where PRASA will require operational funding support from government.

PRASA’s budget for the new financial year is R20.5-billion, of which R7.5-billion will be for operations and R12.9-billion for capital projects.

Emeran says PRASA exceeded its capital budget last year for the first time in a decade.